I think 2000 euros for a kids bike is ever so slightly more than most people would be willing to spend. When the smallest one needed to move from a balance bike to pedals there was no way I was even spending £400 on an Islabikes CNOC16. Hope Academy to the rescue, got the blingiest 16″ bike of any 3yr old I know for £14 a month.

Has anyone thought about putting a deposit down on a Fisker Ocean? 380 miles range for £50k seems pretty much the best that would be available for quite some time.

Will there be chicken? If not I’m not interested.

Thread title – ‘Skateboard for an overweight 40yo?’ 😁

FTFY. Doubtful to be honest, I tried once many moons ago and I just could not get the hang of it.

The jarrow one is by far the best in the NE for beginners. They run youngun sessions too IIRC.

Down to 6yo, they are starting a toddlers session but it’s aimed at balance bikes and scooters. No confirmed dates on that yet either. I’ve found skateboardgb.org which has pointed me to a place in Darlington but waiting to see what they do in the way of lessons.

Thanks for the heads up on the tool @doublezero. I’ll order one of those when I order the board.

Cheap one and a Scooter

She has one of those 3 wheel lean-to-turn scooters. Whizzes along on that at some speed.

Thanks @diggery and @mtnboarder – some good pointers there.

My Big American Faceless Corp (TM) is giving us the day off.

Yup, mine as well. We’ve had two emails from high ups in the US sending their condolences.

I’m managing to avoid the bank holiday and the funeral by being in the office in the US. I’m dreading travelling through London to the airport on Saturday.

Twitter seems to be a mixture of people who couldn’t give a toss, people who do give a toss, and that special breed of people who are blaming Meghan Markle for it all while quietly ignoring Price Andrew being a turbononce.

This entire f**king house. Been in 8 years and every single thing has been a pain in the arse. Didn’t help that the last time anything was done it seemed to have been done by Bodgitt & Scarper.

I can’t wait to finish off the crappy little bits and bloody sell the place.

Use the DVLA MOT history checker. I think most of the ones that give you detail on outstanding finance and any insurance write-offs charge a fee.

That was great. I’d like to know where Bruni got that 2+ seconds from at the top where everyone else seemed to struggle.

@ta11pau1 – had a bunch of these last year. 3 families and one night the women decided it would be fun to sit up until the small hours banging on about how much they didn’t like their other halves, who were in the tents next to them. Asked them to be quiet a few times until I got really pissed off and started shouting at 3am. Spoke to site management and had them kicked off the next morning, **** ****.

# That dickhead with the acoustic guitar

This is a random one but I’ll always remember it. Two blokes turning up to a campsite in Edale in separate cars. Only the cars were Aston Martin Cygnets (a £30-35k Toyota iQ with Aston badging). Pitched a tiny tent and disappeared the next day.

I wouldn’t want to use one of those single ring canister jobbies for 2 days never mind 2 months.

Not CHEAP but cheap to run would be a Coleman dual fuel stove, runs on unleaded. Yes I know petrol is expensive right now but £1.75 a litre is cheaper than £4 for half a litre of meths at screwfix.

As usual with Saudi it’s a vanity project for Mohammed Bin Salman to divert attention away from their appalling human rights record. See the Public Investment Fund, LIV Golf, and endless Aramco sponsorship of F1 for prime examples.

Nest is either hardwired or on a stand. The receiver (heat link) goes near the boiler. We have one, it’s fairly good for the home/away location based thing. The learning is half decent, and once every six months or so it’ll knock the heating back half a degree to see if you notice, if you don’t it’ll carry on at the lower temperature.

The guy that imports Kingdom into the UK was trying to flog these for £850 on the Hamsterley Facebook page.

He stopped replying when I said a set of Middleburns were £190 and weighed the same.

Has anyone been through Heathrow recently? Got to fly to the US for work in a few weeks. I’ll probably be flying down from Newcastle then either BA or American to Dallas Fort Worth.

Hmm, from your responses I think you just needed confirmation that flying was the best option and that driving was never really on the cards.

Enjoy it anyway, I love it out there and I haven’t been since 2018. Get over to Chatel and Morgins if you can.

35mpg! Your car needs to get in the sea.

If there’s 2/3 of you driving can work out the same or cheaper than flying. If it’s just you then fly, but you’ll be on a batteryless e-bike.

Honda Jazz, I got one for the missus when she passed her test. Cost £500 and had intergalactic miles on it. Ran a treat and had unbelievable amounts of space inside for such a small car. For £7k you should be able to get a minter.

Or look for an older Fabia estate with the 1.9 PD engine. It’ll do 55-60mpg all day long and last forever.

From Sunderland I’ve done it door to door in 24hrs with a fair few stops along the way. That’s sharing driving, if you’re alone you might want to take it easier.

I’ve only flown once and to be honest I wish I’d driven as it was a right ballache with the bike bag and overly officious oversize luggage security bods.

To be fair it is a nice drive

£3 on hook a duck to win a goldfish, or £3 for a multipack of tuna in a supermarket. Easy decision you don’t have mullet over.

one of the smaller stages was flat-out dangerous (the tent where Feeder played I think?)

I remember that, massive crowd as it was their second (after Reading the day before) performance since their drummer had committed suicide. Could you have easily been on the main stage for the amount of people that were there.

I think it all depends on size. Seems the smaller sizes they are getting in quicker than the larger ones. I would think this is down to availability of components that are not Hope branded like mechs, cassettes, shifters etc.

We had eldest on a balance bike at 20 months, youngest on the same one at about 18-19 months they are both quite tall. For £5 a month though it may just be worth getting it until he’s ready in case you can’t get one further down the line.

The Queen – every single day. I swear the one on telly is just animatronic, they keep the real one in a vat of formaldehyde in the basement of Windsor Castle just in case anyone figures out human cloning.

I was at Leeds in 2002, the last year it was at Temple Newsam. We were right near the entrance to one of the campsites from the arena so had loads of traffic past our tents and the toilets were at the top of the hill.

It was Sunday night it all just went mental. Someone set a fire about 30ft away and started chucking deodorant cans on which generated a few decent sized fireballs. Then some genius threw a camping gas canister on, while it was on there a bloke tried to light his fag on the fire. He was very lucky, it went boom in a big way not much later. Bogs were on fire not long after that. I went and slept in the car as police helicopter was right above us all night. Absolute bedlam.

2003 at Bramham Park was like a village fete in comparison.

What about a timber frame extension? Do they require smaller foundations? IANAB

This arrived today. Looks to be brand new as it hasn’t got a bit of dirt or a scratch anywhere on it. It’s a very very nice bit of kit. Slightly heavier than the equivalent Isla CNOC 16, but then it has got beefy tires and disc brakes so that’s to be expected.

Slipknot – always found their music a bit bleh. They were on at Leeds festival before someone I wanted to see (maybe Less Than Jake?). They were bloody good, put on a proper show.

Other end of the spectrum. I quite like Red Hot Chili Peppers on a recording but live they were utter shite.

I spent most of the early days of STW doing studenty things like drinking copious amounts of beer and smoking funny cigarettes so I didn’t even know of it.

Got back into MTB around 2010, joined here in 2011 and just lurked until MBR got shut down (because of GDPR allegedly). I’ve subscribed on and off since then and still lurk but I do post a bit more now.

3x unknown – I’ll keep the tags next time. Not even close to being ripe yet.

What chillies have I got?

I’ve just had another look at the ones in photo 1 and they are starting to turn green.

This is all new to me. I got 3 plants expecting to get about 7-8 chillies a plant. I think I’m going to end up with about 20-30 per plant the way things are going.

Hmm, chocolate rings a bell.

I know one of them was just Jalapeno which I expect will be the middle one.

I’ve not used CRC for quite a while. I remember once ordering an SLX mech at 2pm on a Friday on their free delivery and it was in my hand at 11am the next day.

Our local Evri/Hermes service is very hit and miss. Last year I had a parcel which they “attempted” to deliver 6 times. They didn’t, no card, no knock on the door, nothing. I did eventually get it about 2 weeks later. Other times stuff arrives on the scheduled date.

@nicholas_yiu that is the exact route I take the eldest on when we can’t be arsed packing the car for Hamsterley. Maybe not this time of the year though as his hayfever turns him into a snivelling mess near the oilseed rape fields.

What does the one above Blood Youth say?

Remove it and take it to the plumbers merchants

Please don’t do this. There’s quite literally thousands of showers on the market and every company uses umpteen different types of cartridge. They can even change cartridges on a production run so externally it’ll look the same but one won’t fit the other. You’ll just get asked for make/model and sent on your way.

Might be that the new unit isn’t suited for gravity fed systems.

Is that the one where you can sploosh through the ford after the stony drop down from the farmyard?

That’s the one, sometimes I go out of my way to add it in purely because the majority of everything else is so bloody flat/tedious.